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Super Mario Seriality : Nintendo’S Narratives and Audience Targeting Within the Video Game Console Industry Smith, AN

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Super Mario Seriality : Nintendo’S Narratives and Audience Targeting Within the Video Game Console Industry Smith, AN Super Mario seriality : Nintendo’s narratives and audience targeting within the video game console industry Smith, AN http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137388155_2 Title Super Mario seriality : Nintendo’s narratives and audience targeting within the video game console industry Authors Smith, AN Type Book Section URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/33670/ Published Date 2014 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. Super Mario Seriality: Nintendo’s Narratives and Audience Targeting within the Video Game Console Industry Anthony N. Smith At the conclusion of Super Mario Bros. (1986), the archetypal side-scrolling platform game, the player-character Mario confronts his arch-nemesis Bowser for the first time. The demonic monster Bowser – King of the Koopa – awaits Mario upon a drawbridge spanning a lava sea. The player’s game-long narrative goal is Mario’s freeing of Princess Peach by defeating Bowser, her captor;1 the player must guide Mario beneath the Koopa King, who hops up and down hurling axes, having him then leap upon a larger glowing axe hovering at the opposite end of the drawbridge. Successful completion of this task results in the disintegration of the drawbridge and Bowser’s descent into the lava below upon which Mario enters an adjacent room where Peach awaits. Screen text conveys her highness’ gratitude – ‘Thank you Mario!’, confirming that the hero’s ‘quest is over’. The Kyoto-based company Nintendo developed Super Mario Bros. for its first home video game console, the Nintendo Family Computer, released in Japan in 1983 and rebranded and launched in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. The company has developed further Super Mario games on each of its subsequent home and handheld video game hardware platforms. One of many such games is New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009), developed for the Nintendo Wii (the company’s fifth generation home console, which launched worldwide in 2006). The game not only reprises the two-dimensional side-scrolling platform-game formula of Super Mario Bros., like many other Super Mario games, it also appropriates the 1 specific narrative goal of the original game, Mario’s rescue of Peach. Additionally, New Super Mario Bros. Wii closely replicates many more specific narrative details from the original game, including its final showdown scenario between Mario and Bowser. Following the template established by the original game, the Koopa King awaits the player character at the far side of a lava-spanning bridge; again, the player must guide Mario beneath the bounding Bowser, dodging the latter’s deadly projectiles (this time, fireballs), and have Mario jump upon a large button (which has replaced the glowing axe) that collapses the bridge, sending Bowser hurtling below. But on this occasion the quest isn’t over. The awaiting princess is revealed as an imposter, not Peach but rather a Magikoopa – a sorcerer servant of Bowser – adorned in blonde wig and the princess’s trademark pink dress. The Magikoopa sprinkles mystical dust over the lava into which its master fell, causing Bowser – now at least twenty times his previous size – to rise from the fire. To free the genuine Peach, the player must navigate Mario across a set of moving platforms, with a marauding Bowser in hot pursuit, towards a second button, which – once pressed – collapses the lava sea floor beneath Bowser’s feet. New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s replication and variation of narrative content from the initial entry in the Super Mario series of games dovetails neatly with Nintendo’s broad industrial goals in recent years, specifically its audience-targeting strategies. As I go on to detail, the company has, from the mid-2000s onwards, aimed to attract a wide audience of both children and adults new to console gaming, while simultaneously appealing to dedicated video game consumers (so called “hardcore” gamers).2 New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s reprisal of the basic narrative formula from the original Super Mario Bros. is appropriate for new gamers, as it offers a discrete and coherent narrative experience (Bowser kidnaps Peach, Mario rescues her). Yet 2 New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s playful variations on narrative elements previously established within the series, such as its reworking of the original Mario-Bowser showdown, has the potential to surprise and delight dedicated players familiar with prior Super Mario games.3 This chapter explores further the connections between Nintendo’s video game narratives and audience targeting aims. It details in particular how a specific mode of serial storytelling, emerging from Nintendo’s engagement with its back catalogue of games and ongoing innovation in video game technologies, serves to target these two distinct audience segments. This chapter contributes to the games studies literature concerning the unique ways in which video games convey narratives, which I define as storyworlds – that is, spatio-temporal models of story that incorporate characters, props, actions and settings – and their presentations.4 As such studies make clear, video games are, at the level of textual artefact, not narrative objects per se, but rather interactive systems that facilitate the emergence of fictional narrative through the playing of games; controlling characters and props, players instigate actions within settings, and from this process video game storyworlds are conveyed via screens.5 Although important, this work typically neglects the industrial circumstances that inform video game narratives. These studies therefore usefully articulate how fictional narratives emerge from video games, but fail to account for interplay of creativity, industry and technology that contribute to their formations. Taking an ‘historical poetics’ approach that links storytelling strategies to their conditions of production and circulation, this chapter accounts for the ways in which a significant industrial practice – namely, audience targeting – can inform narrative.6 Combining evidence of production – in the form of insights from Nintendo personnel – with narratalogical analyses of the company’s games, the chapter explores the ways in which Nintendo narratives are 3 configured to meet the requirements of both new and experienced gamers. To contextualise this case study, the chapter first establishes the specific industrial conditions for the recent development of Nintendo’s software. Nintendo narrative contexts Nintendo operates within the video game console market, a specific sector of the video game industry concerned with the production, distribution and consumption of games intended for the home and portable console hardware devices currently manufactured by the oligopoly of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. The institutions that typically drive video game development in this sector can be divided into three distinct categories: the development studios (that create video games in code form), publishers (that often fund development studios, as well as manufacture, market and distribute the hard copies of video games) and the console hardware manufacturers (that build, market and distribute video game platforms). Publishers and development studios most typically operate separately from hardware manufacturers, releasing “third-party” games for hardware manufacturers’ platforms (and paying licence fees to the hardware manufacturers on the basis of game sales). But it is, in addition, common practice for a given hardware manufacturer to seek market differentiation by developing and publishing its own “first party” games exclusively for its own platforms.7 Understanding the contexts of Nintendo’s video game narratives, requires understanding the company’s wider goals and strategies for the hardware for which it designs its games. In the mid-2000s, Nintendo’s wanted to regain the home-console hardware market share it had conceded to Sony and Microsoft over the previous years. Nintendo had been, with the NES and its successor – the Super Nintendo 4 Entertainment System (SNES), dominant within this market in the late mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s (over its chief rival Sega).8 But competition from Sony (which entered this market in 1994 with the PlayStation) and Microsoft (whose first console, the Xbox, was released in 2001) led to a decline in Nintendo’s share.9 By the early 2000s, Nintendo had descended into third place in terms of home console market share (behind Sony and Microsoft) due to the poor sales of its fourth home hardware device, the Nintendo GameCube (released in 2001).10 Nintendo responded to the competition by reconfiguring its audience-targeting strategies for both its hardware and software. Part of Sony and Microsoft’s success had been built on targeting teenage and adult gamers with “mature” narrative content, such as the third party series Grand Theft Auto, with its violence and lawlessness, and Microsoft’s first-party series Halo, a militaristic science fiction saga. As Nintendo company president Satoru Iwata admitted in 2002, there was a widespread perception that Nintendo and its content was heavily skewed towards a pre-teen demographic
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